This day in history

Today is Sunday, Aug. 28, the 240th day of 2011. There are 125 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

•On Aug. 28, 1963, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place in the nation’s capital, where more than 200,000 people listened as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

•In 1955, Emmett Till, a black teenager from Chicago, was abducted from his uncle’s home in Money, Miss., by two white men after he had supposedly whistled at a white woman; he was found brutally slain three days later.

•In 1973, more than 600 people died as an earthquake shook central Mexico.

•In 1988, 70 people were killed when three Italian stunt planes collided during an air show at the U.S. Air Base in Ramstein, West Germany.

•In 1990, an F5 tornado struck the Chicago area, killing 29 people.

Ten years ago: Gateway, the nation’s No. 4 manufacturer of personal computers, said it was laying off 4,700 employees — 25 percent of its global workforce — because of an increasingly bleak market.

Five years ago: Prosecutors in Colorado abruptly dropped their case against John Mark Karr in the slaying of JonBenet Ramsey, saying DNA tests failed to put him at the crime scene despite his insistence that he’d killed the 6-year-old beauty queen. President George W. Bush marked the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina by visiting the Gulf Coast.

One year ago: Conservative commentator Glenn Beck and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin headlined a “Restoring Honor” rally attended by tens of thousands in Washington. U.S. and Afghan forces repelled attackers wearing American uniforms and suicide vests in a pair of simultaneous assaults before dawn on NATO bases near the Pakistan border.